Dream Chasers (29 page)

“He ran away. He was afraid. I tried to tell you, but you gave me no chances.”

He took her elbow. “I'm sorry, but I had to put your safety first.”

She stiffened and pulled away. “He is not a criminal.”

“I want to hear the whole story, but give me a moment to speak to these officers first.”

“So you can hunt him down?”

Green stared at her, puzzled. Why this irrational anger? What kind of twisted loyalty would make her take sides with the man responsible for her daughter's death rather than with those seeking to bring him to account? He tried to sound gentle, belying the urgency he felt. “We need to find him. As you said, he needs to tell us what happened.”

That seemed to mollify her, and she went inside while he spoke to the responding officers and relayed the latest information on Riley's whereabouts to the Com Centre. Brian Sullivan was just arriving back at the station and was happy to work with the duty inspector to coordinate the manhunt. Riley could not have had more than a ten-minute head start, and the bright red sports car should be easy to spot.

With the search underway, Green went inside and found Marija in the kitchen, boiling the kettle for tea. She paced, avoiding his probing eyes while she fiddled with the cups and tea bags. He gritted his teeth, willing himself to be patient until the tea was prepared and she had taken her first sip. Only then did she seem to sag with defeat.

He forced a gentle tone. “Okay, tell me what happened.” She cradled her tea, and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

“I don't know who to blame. Lea had such a lot of secrets. This boy, the drugs... I never thought she would smoke marijuana, but this boy—”

“Riley?” She looked startled. “You know?”

“Just his name. Not what happened. I'm sorry I interrupted.”

“You didn't tell me.” Anger tightened her features again, and he cursed his clumsiness. She sipped her tea in silence for a long moment, as if debating with herself, before she resumed. “Riley said she bought the marijuana, she said it would be fun to try it together. It was very beautiful evening, the first date they have all week, because his sports keeps him so busy. It's always training, training, publicity, meet this person and that person. All he was thinking about was Lea. He tells me he loved her, because she was very different from the other girls—” She shot him a sharp scowl, perhaps anticipating his doubt. “I believe him. He was very upset. Crying, crying. He said he couldn't sleep, and he never wanted this to happen. He didn't want the marijuana. Lea teased him, but he doesn't want drugs in his body. Now he wish he did take the cigarette too. Lea starts to act very wild. They walked a little and sat on a bench together, but Lea couldn't stay still. She started running around, to make him chase her, and they were playing—wrestling, he said—and he tried to stop her. To hold her quiet. Not hard, he said, just her arms, but she was fighting and fighting, then suddenly she was not breathing. He says she panicked. He got scared someone would accuse him, because of the drugs and because he was holding her on the ground when she die.”

Her voice faltered on the last word, and she took a shaky sip of her tea. This time Green waited without interruption, although half a dozen questions crowded his thoughts. What about the aborted 911 call, and the call to his agent? What about throwing the body into the river?

“Was Lea taking any medication? For a cold, asthma or dieting?”

She shook her head back and forth vehemently. “Dieting she didn't believe in. She was all the time very healthy. That's why this marijuana, I don't understand it. So many things I don't understand.” She lapsed into silence again, nursing her pain. It doesn't mean anything, Green thought. Parents were the least likely to know anything about their teenager's day-to-day life. Wisely, he kept quiet until she resumed her thread. “He is so ashamed. He thought only of him, not Lea. He didn't call the police, he put the body in the river so it looks like an accident. So maybe people won't discover he was with her. But now, he says something else is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“That's the reason he came to see me. To apologize that he was a coward and now he had to stop. He saw the paper this morning about the social worker who was killed, and he knew it was because of him. Someone is trying to hide what he did by killing again.”

Green's eyes narrowed, and he found himself holding his breath. Marija raised her ravaged blue eyes to his. “He was afraid. He was looking all the time out the window like he was looking for something. Like the killer was after him. That's why he ran away. Not so that he can escape from you, but from the killer. And it is the killer that you need to find, not this boy.”

“But he knows who the killer is.”

She nodded. “I asked who, and he said he couldn't tell, because it was his fault. The killer did this for him.”

“Did he explain?”

Her shrug was regretful. “I told him he has to tell you. He can't run forever. I give him your card, but when he said no, I came to the bathroom to phone you. When I came out, he was gone.”

“Did you see anything outside in the street? A person? A car?”

“A few cars. Nothing special.”

Green gritted his teeth. He didn't want to plant ideas in her head, but he had a very good idea who it might have been. “Do you remember any makes? Colours?”

“Silver one. Another red. And one big black one.”

Green gave her hand a quick squeeze, which he hoped was reassuring, and excused himself to relay the information to the Communications Centre. Inwardly, every muscle was taut with fear. It had to be Vic McIntyre. McIntyre drove a black
SUV
. He was the person Riley had phoned the night Lea died. Moreover, Vic had been a man with a purpose that morning. What if Marija was right? If McIntyre, not Riley, was the villain behind the deaths? Green thought about all the bits of information he learned about McIntyre. The man had a backyard playground worth perhaps a quarter of a million. He threw noisy, extravagant parties where no doubt the drugs flowed as freely as the booze. He drove a car that cost more than many annual incomes. Where did all the money come from? Granted, there was big money to be made in elite sports, but McIntyre wasn't at the top yet. He was still clawing his way up, pinning all his hopes on the talents of his rising star. A star who had recently become distracted and fallen down on his training, perhaps wanting some pleasures in his life other than the strict regime McIntyre had ordered. What if McIntyre had supplied Crystal with the lethal drug, knowing full well that Riley, the anti-drug poster boy, would refuse to take it, but that the smaller, more daring Lea Kovacev would not hesitate. Had he intended her to die, or just be so stoned that it would turn Riley against her?

Titrating just the right amount of crystal meth into a bag of marijuana was an inexact science. Perhaps McIntyre hadn't cared whether he killed her or not, as long as it killed the romance. The second murder was a different story, regardless of which woman the victim proved to be. Both Crystal and Jenna knew too much. Of all the men Green had encountered in the case, McIntyre had the ruthlessness needed to chop a woman into pieces to protect his own interests. What if he was on a deadly campaign to erase all signs that pointed to him? The crucial question was—where would he stop? Riley O'Shaughnessy was his protégé, almost his surrogate son, not to mention his meal ticket to the big time. He had done all this to protect that asset, if not the boy himself. What would he do now that the boy had become a liability? Green didn't have a moment's doubt. McIntyre had other irons in the fire—other clients, maybe even an exclusive drug business. Riley would be a loss, but some other dream kid would come along. A man who could decapitate a young woman didn't have much room in his heart for sentiment. Now that man was on the loose, chasing down the boy who could bring it all down.

W
hile
the duty inspector snapped out fresh orders over the radio, Brian Sullivan studied the wall map in the Communications Centre, tracing routes with his finger. The Com Centre had all sorts of computer maps and satellite surveillance systems, but despite all the fancy high-tech, the search for Riley O'Shaughnessy had turned up nothing. Sometimes there was nothing like good old-fashioned paper to get the big picture.

“Looks like he slipped the net,” Sullivan said when Inspector Ford strode over.

“If he's smart, he's ditched the red Mustang,” the inspector replied.

“Green thinks he's not running from us, but from Vic McIntyre.”

“The guy in the black Navigator? Well, that'll be easy to spot too.”

Sullivan stared at the map. Where would the kid run to? Friends? Hockey mates?

Or home. Gananoque. Sullivan turned to the larger map of Eastern Ontario on the other wall. Gananoque was a straight run down Highway 416 and along the 401. In an opened up Mustang, barely an hour and a half 's drive. He tapped the map. “We need to call in the
OPP
, expand the search south, set up road blocks along 416.”

Ford looked unconvinced. He was a sparkplug of a man bulked up by body armour and equipment that made him look twice as wide as he really was. He shook his head slowly. “If I was the kid, I'd take back roads. A red Mustang on the 416 is a sitting duck.”

Sullivan's phone rang before he could answer. It was Lyle Cunningham from Ident. “You got an overtime budget for all this new shit your guys just brought in?”

“That's Devine's problem, not mine. Green's okayed it. We've got two murders here, nice young women. If Devine ever wants to make Deputy Chief, she'll know what's good for her.”

“If you say so. We're just logging in the stuff from the O'Shaughnessy house, but I thought you'd want to know. We did some preliminary tests before we even took it off the truck, just to see if we could eliminate anything from our investigation.”

Sullivan smiled. “You're the best, Lyle. Anything?”

“Good news, bad news. The clothes you brought me? None of them appear to have any blood on them.”

Well, that was a long shot, Sullivan thought. The murder clothes would be soaked in blood, so the kid would almost certainly have ditched them. “What about the shoes? Any match to the print?”

“We haven't got to that yet. We can't do everything at once, you know, so I went with the blood first.”

“All right, what's the good news?”

Cunningham's voice almost sounded excited. “It's not final yet, you understand. But it looks like the shovel, the axe and the wheelbarrow all have traces of blood on them.”

“Even though they'd been cleaned?”

“You know you can never wash all that stuff out of the cracks and pits. That's how we get the bad guys. If there's a molecule left in there, the Luminol will find it. But it could be anyone's blood, or animal blood for that matter. Is your guy a hunter?”

Sullivan pictured the O'Shaughnessys. They'd grown up in a small town in Eastern Ontario, rugged and blue collar. Chances are they all hunted deer. But cutting up deer meat is a very precise science; hunters don't chop up their quarry with an axe.

His heart felt heavy. “Could be, but I'm betting this isn't deer blood.”

“We'll need time to see if it's human, even longer to get the
DNA
back, but at least this gives you a start.”

“What about the plumbing van?”

“Jeez, Sully, give me a break. I haven't got to that yet either. The guys just towed it to the lot. There are lots of tools and piping and drop cloths that look pretty clean, but when I know something definitive, you'll be the first to know.”

Sullivan thanked him and rang off, deep in thought. The net was closing, and despite what Green believed, things were looking worse and worse for the hockey whiz kid. They now had the tools the woman had been killed with. The body had been stuffed into garbage bags, so it could have been transported in the van without spilling much blood in the interior. But chopping up the body would have produced a mess, even if it was done post mortem. Whoever did this would have needed a concealed location, and even after clean-up, there would be traces of blood left behind.

He remembered the wet, flattened area of grass in Darren O'Shaughnessy's backyard. Was that where the dismemberment had taken place? Did the tall cedar hedge provide enough privacy, or would neighbours have seen and heard something? It was worth making a few inquiries. And with Riley a potential out-of-control killer driving around the city in a panic, it was better than sitting around the Com Centre twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the search to turn up something. He phoned Cunningham back, fully expecting an earful when he asked for an Ident officer to check out the back yard and the garage, but the man was surprisingly amenable. He couldn't send someone right away, but would put it on the list.

“I saw the body,” he said by way of explanation. “Whoever did this to that poor girl deserves to be strung up by his balls.”

Darren O'Shaughnessy answered the doorbell himself this time, and at the sight of Sullivan, his face darkened in a scowl. He blocked the doorway, six inches shorter than Sullivan but solid as a tank.

“Sully. Now there's a true friend in need.”

“It's not a social call, Darren.”

“You bet it's not. What's the idea of coming in here when I wasn't home, upsetting my kid and turning the place upside down. With warrants, for Chrissake. I would have given you anything you wanted!”

“Nothing to hide, is that it?”

“You bet. And neither does Riley.”

“Then you won't mind answering a few questions?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah, I do mind. I don't owe you a goddamn thing.”

“There's a couple of points that have come up in our investigation. You might want to clear them up sooner, rather than later down at the station.”